For months, the government has been working on a mandate to reopen the nuclear issue in Italy. Public debate has been buzzing about "sustainable nuclear," small modular reactors, energy security, and ecological transition. Yet perhaps the first thing to say is something else. --- Nuclear power, in Italy, has never ended.
Italian power plants stopped producing electricity after the 1987 referendum[1], held in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. In 2011, after the Fukushima disaster, a second referendum confirmed that choice. Italy is one of the few European countries where the rejection of nuclear power has been expressed twice through a direct popular vote.But closing the plants didn't mean shutting down nuclear power. Rather, it meant entering a long phase of managing its legacy.
For nearly forty years, Italy has continued to live with spent fuel from old power plants, thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste scattered across the country in temporary storage facilities, plants yet to be dismantled, and ongoing surveillance, maintenance, and management costs that continue to fall on the community.
It is a less visible nuclear power, almost removed from public discourse, but profoundly present in the materiality of the territory.
According to the National Inventory of Radioactive Waste, Italy currently holds over 33,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste spread across temporary storage sites from Piedmont to Basilicata. This will be joined by waste from the decommissioning of old power plants-Caorso, Trino, Latina, and Garigliano-and waste generated daily by medical, industrial, and research activities.
Because nuclear energy isn't just about large nuclear power plants. It also exists in hospitals and laboratories.
nuclear medicine professionals, in research centers, in industrial activities that use radioactive materials, in specialized transport and in storage sites scattered throughout the country.
And here lies perhaps the first major denial of the contemporary debate. Nuclear power doesn't just produce energy. It also creates a long material legacy of waste, infrastructure, maintenance, surveillance, and risk management. A very long temporality that continues well beyond the economic life of the plants and beyond the very political era that generated them.
In this sense, nuclear power is a unique technology: it outlives itself. Even when it stops producing electricity, it continues to generate costs, technical equipment, territorial conflicts, and collective responsibilities that span entire generations.
And it is precisely this material continuity that makes the return of nuclear power to the Italian political debate so unique. Because the country is attempting to reopen the nuclear issue without having yet closed the previous one.
The National Repository established by the 2010 law still does not exist. Suggestions for its location have generated widespread local opposition, and no territory appears willing to permanently shoulder the burden of the country's radioactive memory.
The very "temporary" nature of existing deposits thus tends to continue indefinitely. In many cases, the temporary seems to have taken on the character of permanence.
This isn't just a technical problem. It's a political, territorial, and even cultural issue.
The experience of ScanZiamo le Scorie , born after the 2003 protests in Scanzano Jonico against the idea of a national repository in Basilicata, demonstrates how the nuclear issue is now intertwined with distrust of institutions, delays in decommissioning , and the perception of territories as expendable. In parliamentary hearings on nuclear power, many associations insisted on a specific point: before designing new facilities, the concrete capacity to secure existing ones must be demonstrated.
The problem isn't just about waste. It's about the very credibility of the state. If the decommissioning of old power plants continues to slip from decade to decade, if the national repository fails to find a location after more than thirty years of discussions, then the return of nuclear power inevitably raises a broader question: is a contemporary society truly capable of managing technological processes that require administrative continuity, oversight, and maintenance over such long periods?
In this scenario, vocabulary is not a secondary factor. Nuclear power has always been a linguistic issue. Words serve to shape public perception, to make risk acceptable, to transform political and social problems into seemingly neutral and technical issues.
It is no coincidence that today we talk about "sustainable nuclear power", "energy transition", "technological neutrality", "energy security", but much more rarely about waste, contamination or accidents.
In France, where nuclear energy continues to be one of the state's strategic priorities, this dynamic is particularly evident. For years, sociologists, psychologists, and communications specialists have been working on the theme of "social acceptance" around the Cigéo project for the deep geological storage of radioactive waste. Even words are constantly shifting in meaning. Terms like "reversibility," "repository," or "storage" are being redefined to make the problem more manageable on a symbolic and political level, diluting the very idea of irreversibility and permanence that accompanies radioactive waste.
In short, words don't just describe nuclear power. They help make it socially governable.
Even the so-called "new nuclear" is described using a language strongly oriented towards innovation. SMRs-small modular reactors-are presented as safer, more flexible, less expensive, and more easily integrated technologies into contemporary regions and energy networks.
Behind this narrative, however, emerge enormous technical and economic uncertainties. Many projects exist primarily as industrial announcements, startups backed by public funding, and industrial and financial operations built around the promise of a future energy revolution.
Companies like Newcleo are working on molten lead-cooled fast reactors, technologies that have been chasing the dream of near-limitless nuclear power for decades without ever achieving true industrial stability. Yet billions of public funds continue to be invested in the sector.
It is significant that many of the parliamentary hearings in favor of nuclear power consistently emphasize issues such as industrial policy, the reconstruction of a national supply chain, the competitiveness of the production system, strategic security, and the need to ensure energy continuity for an increasingly energy-intensive industrial system.
Nuclear power is presented not so much as a simple technology for producing electricity but as a strategic infrastructure for industrial sovereignty.
It's no coincidence that Confindustria explicitly links the nuclear issue to the risk of deindustrialization in the country and the need to support new energy consumption linked to digitalization, electrification, and the growth of data centers.
Likewise, many companies in the sector insist on the need to rebuild highly specialized technical skills and plan investments spread over very long periods of time.
Europe itself today appears to be experiencing profoundly different strategies. France continues to invest in nuclear power as a strategic state infrastructure, while Germany has gradually abandoned nuclear power, focusing primarily on renewables. Yet the energy crisis following the war in Ukraine has exposed the fragilities of both models: on the one hand, the rising costs and industrial difficulties of the French nuclear system; on the other, Germany's heavy dependence on Russian gas. Rather than a stable equilibrium, the European energy landscape today appears to be plagued by profound uncertainties.
Here perhaps emerges one of the most interesting aspects of the return of nuclear power in the 21st century. Nuclear power is not returning primarily to fuel the old industrial world of the 20th century. It is returning within a new energy-intensive economy marked by the growth of data centers, artificial intelligence, the cloud , automation, and global technological competition.
The enormous increase in energy consumption related to digital infrastructure is profoundly changing the contemporary energy debate. The challenge is no longer simply to produce electricity, but to ensure continuous and stable energy flows to information and industrial systems that operate on a global scale and require increasingly gigantic energy capacities.
Even some documents critical of SMRs openly acknowledge this scenario. Italia Nostra observes that the renewed interest in small modular reactors stems partly from the need to power gigantic digital systems and IT infrastructures with extremely high energy consumption.
The energy transition thus risks assuming a paradoxical character. It's not so much a reduction in consumption and technological dependence, but rather an attempt to meet an increasingly gigantic energy demand driven by digital capitalism, militarization, and global geopolitical competition.
In this context, the distinction between civil and military nuclear power is also becoming increasingly blurred. After the war in Ukraine and the Russian gas crisis, nuclear power has once again been presented as an instrument of national security, strategic autonomy, and energy sovereignty. It is no coincidence that Emmanuel Macron has openly declared that civil and military nuclear power are "inseparable."
In reality, they always have been. The history of nuclear power has been intertwined since its inception with military apparatuses, strategic research, plutonium management, and the building of state power. SMRs themselves, in many cases, derive from technologies originally developed in the naval and military fields.
And it is perhaps here that the return of nuclear power reveals its most profound dimension. Because the atom is not just an energy source. It also implies a particular form of economic, technical, and political organization of society.
Nuclear power requires extremely long lead times, large initial investments, administrative continuity, highly specialized scientific apparatus, permanent control systems, and a centralized risk management system that no other energy sector possesses to the same extent. It's no coincidence that, even in parliamentary hearings most favorable to the return of nuclear power, words like planning, national strategy, industrial supply chain, safety, regulatory stability, and public coordination continually crop up.
Even those closest to a liberal vision of the economy inevitably end up demanding: public guarantees, state support, independent authorities, centralized procedures, and investments planned over decades.
This is a significant contradiction. For decades, Western capitalism has extolled flexibility, privatization, decentralization, and reduced government intervention. Nuclear power, on the other hand, inevitably tends to reintroduce planning, strategic continuity, and the permanent presence of the state.
This is also why the return of nuclear power seems to speak less of the industrial world of the twentieth century and much more of the current crisis. Energy crisis, climate crisis, geopolitical competition, digitalization, fear of European deindustrialization: it is within this intertwining that nuclear power is once again being proposed as a possible solution.
But this very complexity makes it difficult to reduce the debate to a simple clash between supporters and opponents. The issue concerns, rather, the relationship between technology and democracy, between state and territory, between emergency and consensus-building, between the short-term nature of politics and the very long-term nature of material consequences.
Because nuclear power forces us to think on timescales that completely exceed those of ordinary politics. Governments, parliaments, and markets think in terms of years or at most decades. Radioactive waste, on the other hand, thinks in terms of centuries and sometimes millennia.
Perhaps this is the most repressed point of the public debate. Nuclear power promises energy security in the present, but it transfers to the future an enormous amount of technical, economic, and environmental responsibilities that no generation can truly fully control.
And as the world experiences climate crises, energy wars, and new strategic competitions, nuclear power increasingly appears to reflect the transformations of the present: energy crises, geopolitical competition, the centralization of technological power, the relentless growth of consumption, and the difficulties contemporary democracies face in governing processes that extend far beyond the realm of ordinary politics.
September 2026
https://alternativalibertaria.org/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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